Kamal al-Din Hussain Wa'ez Kashefi Bayhaqi, usually called together with the titles of Mawlana or Mulla, was a prolific Persian prose-stylist, a poet, a Quranexegete, a Sufi scholar, and an astronomer of the Timurid era. Kashefi was his pen name, Wa'ez denoted his professional occupation as a preacher. He spent most of his career in Herat, where his academic activities were supported by Ali-Shir Nava'i, a senior vizier in the Timurid court during Sultan Husayn Bayqara's rule, hence the reason for Kashefi to dedicate most of his works to Nava'i. He was also very close to the famous Persian poet and sufi, Nur al-Din 'Abd al-Rahman Jami. His famous works include Akhlaq-e Mohseni and Anwar-e Sohaili in Persian prose, and Jawaher al-Tafsir and Mawaheb-e 'Aliyya which are Persian tafsirs of the Quran.
Life
Kashefi was born in Sabzevar, a city in the province of Bayhaq. He therefore often calls himself al-Kashefi al-Bayhaqi in some of his books. He moved to Herat in 860/1456, where he got acquainted with Nur al-Din 'Abd al-Rahman Jami, the famous Persian poet of the Timurid era. Through him he was introduced to Ali-Shir Nava'i, a senior official as well as writer and poet in the Timurid court. Kashefi remained in Herat until his death in 910/1504. He was buried in Herat, in the vicinity of Jami's grave.
Over the years, Kashefi has been a source of controversy between the Sunnis and the Shi'as. However, recent consensus both in the Persian and English academic spheres is that Kashefi was Sunni in madhhab despite indications of his pious devotion to Shia Imams which is not unusual among pre-Safavid Sunni scholars. There are three reasons why he was denominated as Shi'a scholar from time to time in some sources. First, as like many other Sunni scholars of Khorasan up until the end of the Timurid era, Kashefi composed at least two works in praise of the Ahl al-Bayt and some of the Shi'a Imams. Second, his birthplace, Savzevar, was traditionally a Shia center. Third, when the Safavid empire took over Herat, it promoted Kashefi as a Shi'a scholar "in order to justify their adoption of the Rawżat al-šohadāʾ as a quasi-canonical text that served as the standard script used in the performance of the Shiʿite passion play". In his major tafsir work, Jawaher al-Tafsir, out of around forty tafsirs which he used as reference and which he cites, only three stand out as being Shi'a tafsirs. The remaining sources are Sunni tafsirs.
Works
Around thirty books in prose, poetry, tafsir, astronomy, and Islamic sciences are attributed to Kashefi. The most famous of which are:
Akhlaq-e Moheseni : a treatise on ethics and statecraft in forty chapters, completed in 907/1501-2 and dedicated to Solṭān-Ḥosayn.
Anwar-e Sohaili : a prose recension of Abu’l-Maʿāli’s popular animal fables, Kalila wa Demna in fourteen chapters, commissioned by and dedicated to the Timurid amir Neẓām-al-Din Sheikh Aḥmad Sohayli.
Jawaher al-Tafsir le Tohfat al-Amir : A tafsir comprising the first three Surahs of the Quran. Kashefi composed the tafsir using around 40 tafsirs in Arabic and Persian, and around 20 other treatises and books of Islamic scholars, as his reference. Tafsir al-Kabir of Al-Razi and Al-Taysir fi al-Tafsir of Abu Hafs Umar al-Nasafi appear to be the most cited. It is a voluminous work, and when Kashefi noticed that it was taking him too long to finish the book, he abandoned the project when he reached the fourth Surah. Instead he composed an abridged but full tafsir, called Mawaheb-e 'Aliyya.
Mawaheb-e 'Aliyya : An abridged full tafsir of the Quran. Together with Jawaher al-Tafsir, they have been viewed as popular tafsir works in Afghanistan and the Indian Subcontinent over the past five centuries.
Lobb-e Lobab-e Masnawi : an abridged anthology of selections from the Masnawi of Jalāl al-Din Rumi, compiled in 875/1470-71.
Rawzat al-Shuhada : an ʿAlid martyrology in ten chapters and a conclusion, which focuses largely on Imam Ḥosayn and the tragic events at Karbala, composed in 908/1502-3.
